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CELEBRATE This Week LXXXVI (86)

I’m glad you are here to celebrate! Share a link to your blog post below and/or use #celebratelu to share celebrations on Twitter. Check out the details here. Celebrate This Week goes live on Friday night around 10(ish). Consider it as a weekend celebration. Whenever it fits in your life, add your link. Please leave a little comment love for the person who links before you.

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I turned my Instagram account public. I’ve been using it to collect & document celebrations. I love it. Please follow me there: @ruth_ayres to find celebrations throughout the week.

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One of my standard pieces of advice for young writers is this: Write what you know. Write about events that have already happened, not the things you are looking forward to happening. For example, if you have a party coming up next weekend, wait to write about it. Don’t write about it before it happens.

This is solid writing advice.

I’m going to break it.

Next week is the annual All-Write Summer Institute. I love this conference. (It’s not too late to register! Just click on the link.) It’s like a party in my backyard. Top-notch speakers and educators come from all over to attend. It’s one of the few times when my online world and real world blend. I like this. I like to sit in a session with friends from across the map and friends who teach in the classrooms of my school. I like to have coffee with teachers from a menagerie of states and backgrounds.

I have all kinds of favorite parts, but I especially like the small connections, the conversations happening in the crevices of the day. I like the way our writing wraps around one another and holds us tight as friends…even when we our visits are few.

There’s a group of women who have been reading my writing for years. I think they might know me better than I know myself. It’s become a tradition to eat together at the end of the conference. I’m amazed each year how this time restores me as a human and a teacher and a writer and a friend. It is almost magical.

We each need restoration. Friday leads into Saturday, and this particular Friday, with a table of friends from more than 5 different states, will lead into an annual writing retreat for Choice Literacy contributors.

I’m going to the retreat a day early, with a handful of people who invest in me as a writer, who restore me as a human. Andy encouraged me to take the extra day for the writing retreat. He knows about investment and restoration too.

So here I am, once again shaking off what I think should be doing and embracing who I am. I am a writer who needs restored. It is a process and I celebrate being surrounded by people who believe the best in me and are willing to sit in the quiet to give me space to figure out it is much more important to BE rather than DO. And once I’m settled in who I am, the spilling of words will follow.

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I hope you’ll post a pic of your writing spot and tag it with #iwritehere. Thanks Jennifer Laffin (@laffinteach)for the conversation starter & inspiration that follows as we share our writing spaces.

Meeting you last year was one of the highlights of my summer. I Skyped with Margaret this week and making these connections are indescribable. Teachers I work with just don't understand the power of these connections outside our own classroom walls. So looking forward to see you and everyone else in a couple days and having those “conversations in the crevices of our day!”

“I like the way our writing wraps around one another and holds us tight as friends…even when we our visits are few.” I can't wait to wrap arms around one another at All Write, but the virtual wrapping as we write each week is a blessing beyond measure. Thanks, Ruth!

I am soooo excited for All Write myself and more than a little jealous for the Choice Literacy retreat where you will get to spend some relaxing and creative time. I'm glad Andy encouraged you to spend the extra time. My husband would do the same — They GET it. 🙂 Thanks also for spreading the word about #Iwritehere. I've seen some amazing writing spaces and places. See you next week at All Write!

I am really looking forward to coming to All Write this year. Good idea to take that extra day for your writing retreat. I am sure the time spent will give you extra energy moving forward. Love the pictures of your writing spaces!

Will there be a link-up for I write here? It would be a great Wordless Wednesday post. I had to retire because of disability and have not been to an educators' conference in years. I miss them I hope you have fun and learn a lot.

Sometimes the excitement is just too much and there is no way to wait. I try to save things until after, but I tend to like guidelines rather than hard and fast rules. 🙂

Have a fantastic time at All-Write.

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Hello there!

Hello there! May you find inspiration to celebrate your story, even in the middle of the muddle.

I’m the director of a professional development consortium of 30 schools in northern Indiana committed to empowering student-centered learning. I write books, articles and other stuff because I’m sure stories + teachers make the world a better place. Most importantly, I’m completely charmed by my forever family. Welcome to my corner of the world.

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Discover. Play. Build. is full of resources to make teaching writers manageable and enjoyable. You’ll find video minilessons, downloadable resources and even a preview copy of my new book!